2/07/2000 @ 12:00AM

The Packard is back

What would possess anyone to bring back a car whose last model was turned out in 1956? Ask Roy Gullickson, a former mechanical engineer and agricultural equipment maker, who is trying to revive the once-mighty Packard. “There’s no reason why America can’t build something every bit as good as a Mercedes or BMW,” says Gullickson, a laconic 64-year-old.

Can’t argue with the sentiment. From 1899 to 1956 the Packard Motor Car Co. produced quiet, refined and enormously expensive automobiles. Packards often outsold Cadillacs and Lincolns, were copied by Rolls-Royce and are thought of by some as America’s last true luxury cars. A doomed merger with Studebaker in 1954 ruined the company. The cars live on in museums and in the collections of 14,000 fans.

Gullickson’s crusade began in 1992, after he sold his Keho Products (1999 sales: $4 million), a farm equipment company in Barons, Alberta, Canada, to his sons for $2 million. Approaching Packard Bayliff Coach in Lima, Ohio (which was rebadging Cadillacs with a Packard grille and logo), he bought the Packard trademark for an estimated $50,000. By 1996 Gullickson had developed his own full-size model for a modern Packard, inspired by the 1941 Packard Clipper sedan. Over the next two years he and five engineers and technicians (plus a stylist from the original company) pounded out a handcrafted working prototype at a cost of $800,000.

The result? “It’s not a bad-looking car,” says William Friedrich, president of the largest Packard club, Packard Automobile Classics (PAC). Gullickson’s all-aluminum Packard is equipped with all-wheel drive, disk brakes and a massive V-12 from Ryan Falconer Industries that heaves out 440hp. With dimensions similar tothose of a Cadillac DeVille, the new Packard looks enormous but weighs only 1,700 kilograms. Gullickson claims it can get to 100kph in 4.8 seconds.

Hurtling to production, however, is another matter. Is there any reason to think this effort won’t go the way of other maverick car companies, such as Kaiser-Frazer, Tucker and DeLorean? Gullickson hopes to raise $10 million to carry the company through its next two years and build 10 to 12 cars, priced at $160,000 apiece. He estimates he’d have to sell 75 cars to break even by the third year and then invest another $20 million–he plans to lease the property and equipment–to reach an annual output of 2,000 cars by 2010. That projected investment is enough to make auto executives laugh out loud. “God bless him,” says Rolls-Royce spokesman John Crawford, whose company just spent $70 million developing a new Bentley motor.

Gullickson shrugs. “You’ve got to be resourceful,” he says. Example: tapping outside vendors for his climate control, seats, seat belts, glass, control switches, instrument cluster and parts of his drivetrain. Gullickson moved from chilly Alberta to sweltering Phoenix, Arizona–where the auto industry comes to test its cars–to pick up skilled (and nonunionized) labor on the cheap.

How about getting his new Packard past U.S. regulators? “The NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] buys Accords, Camrys and Tauruses–not Ferraris,” says Robert Panek, a senior engineer at Failure Analysis Associates, which helps new cars meet U.S. government regulations. Panek says Gullickson would have to shell out only if there were a major recall of his cars for failing to meet safety requirements.

Gullickson has orders for 70 cars, though he has taken no deposits. Anthony Boccaccio, 48–a former NASA engineer whose collection of 12 Packards once included U.S. President Warren Harding’s 1921 limo–has ordered a midnight-blue roadster with a white top. What sold him? “Chrysler products are garbage; GM has always made a cheap car. And I would never consider a foreign car,” fumes Boccaccio. “If the new Packard stands for what used to be, that means American ingenuity.”

But first, please, a little sensitivity to the old Packard owners. Gullickson has already angered many of them by sending cease-and-desist letters “threatening everybody in the Packard club who makes anything or does anything with the logo,” says Robert Signom, Packard Museum founder and PAC’s general counsel.

Marketing gaffes like that don’t help. Nor do mechanical glitches. When this reporter went out for a test drive, Gullickson’s baby was suffering from a blown computer chip and wouldn’t start. President Harding wouldn’t have put up with that nonsense.